Loves of Yulian Read Free Page A

memory and what I had done in Hungary. I was relieved to hear her say, “He’s just gotten over scarlet fever. He caught it in Barcelona, where there wasn’t any medicine, and I didn’t know if he was going to live.”
    The part about scarlet fever in Barcelona was true. I had had to stay in bed in our hotel room for several weeks and been allowed to eat nothing but boiled, unsalted potatoes and boiled, unsalted fish, both of which were disgusting. Mother was out most of the time, trying to sell her jewels or get a visa to Portugal or, maybe, Brazil, and the boredom had been terrible too. The reason why there was no medicine was that, in nineteen forty, Spain had just gotten over a civil war, and they were out of almost everything. On the other hand, the part about my being sickly wasn’t true at all. But Mother had told that lie so often, that, I supposed, she had just come to believe it.
    Soon after leaving Lisbon, Mother had explained to me that our ship, which had a huge Brazilian flag painted on each side so that German submarines would not torpedo us, was a “mixed freighter” and not a “liner,” which meant that it carried both freight and passengers, and was smaller and not as luxurious as a liner, which carried mostly just passengers. On the other hand, it was also less expensive, which I had been happy to hear. The ship would make several stops along the way to pick up and drop off both cargo and passengers, so the trip would take longer than it would have on a liner.
    But we weren’t in any hurry, since we would have to wait months, maybe years, once we got there because America only allowed in so many people from any one country each year. Because the war had begun in Poland, there were a lot of Poles on the waiting list. But she assured me that we would get to America eventually and become Americans. America, she said, was the safest country in the world because it had a huge ocean on each side, and it was the strongest and the richest. Before the war, a friend of Mother’s, who worked in the Polish embassy in America, had brought me back a watch that he had bought for just one dollar in a pharmacy. Anywhere else in the world, you had to go to a jewelry store to buy a watch and pay a lot of money. America was also where they made movies, where they had cowboys, and the buildings were hundreds of stories tall.
    Mr. Gordet, whom Mother had met the second day of our voyage, was, Mother had told me, a vice president of the shipping line, and made the trip to South America quite often. He knew a lot of people in Rio, and would introduce Mother to people who were likely to buy some of her jewels. He also got Mother and me transferred to the captain’s table in the dining room, where he ate his meals. To be at the captain’s table, which seated ten people, like each of the other three tables, was considered a great honor, though the captain only ate with us two evenings. His chair, an armchair with a blue cushion on the seat, stood empty the rest of the time. One of the ship’s officers sat at each of the other tables, and I found my eyes constantly attracted to their blue and braid uniforms. In Poland, all the schools, except the one I went to, had navy blue uniforms with brass buttons. Since their meeting, Mother and M. Gordet had spent a lot of time together.
    The talk in the dining room went on in several languages, of which I understood the French and very little of the Portuguese and Spanish. On the second day out, we had a “lifeboat drill.” At supper the previous evening, one of the officers had explained to us, in several languages, that we would hear a siren over the public address system, which meant that we should put on the life jackets that were under our beds and report immediately to the spot on deck that we were assigned to by the chart on our cabin door.
    Coming out of our cabin, we saw a steward, already in his bulky life jacket, who then helped us to tie our own jackets properly and